The world as I see it

Tag Archives: puns

Now that I’ve successfully managed to cull most of my readership, I think it’s time for a little clarification: this is a humour blog.

As much as I’ve succeeded in proving otherwise, I try my best, in every post, to be funny. You may not believe it. It’s absolutely 100% true – these are my best efforts. Which, ironically, is quite funny if you think about it.

Anyway, the blog is called “Funny for Nothing” and although the operative here is “funny”, I am infinitely more adept at the “nothing” bit – and that’s the closest I’ll come to an apology for not writing in a month and a half. I live on my own terms, bro.

As I have so magnificently demonstrated in the last forty-three posts, humour is hard. Of course, some people are just pure comic genius – take Charlie Chaplin for example, in The Great Dictator. Rather eerily, my humour also happens to be like the Great Dictator. I think that everyone’s laughing at my jokes (“Why was Hitler so surprised by the Allied advance? Because he did nazi it coming”) but actually, they’re just laughing at my teeny tiny moustache and ugly haircut.

Every time I write a post, I have to focus all my efforts on being funny. I’ve got to get in the groove, thinking, ‘Be funny, Mushroom Sup. Be funny. You got this’ and then taking deep breaths and doing my humour exercises, which are elaborate and super technical and difficult to explain to such a Plebeian crowd, but mostly consist of me putting my head in a paper bag and imagining Chairman Mao as a toddler.

As a rule, this does not work. Well, it does work in a sense; my mother generally tells me to stop “acting funny” (I have been informed that there is a subtle difference) followed by “you didn’t get this from my side of the family”. Which is probably what Mao’s mum told him when he tried to get the Chinese to manufacture steel in their kitchen stoves using old bicycle parts. Good guy.

On the other hand, whatever little wit I managed to accidentally churn out online dissipates entirely in real-life interactions. It is precisely the sort of thing for which the word “worse” was invented.

I am the meteorite of comebacks (I tend to crash and burn):

“Yo mamma’s fat!”
“Yeah? Well…“fat” is a relative term! Ha!”

Most of my wit occurs in retrospect. If I had a catchphrase it would be “Oh shoot, I should have said that!” To counter this, I’ve fallen into the habit of rehearsing situations in which I might be required to say something witty. I’m still waiting for a situation in which someone says something ridiculous about semi-aquatic marine mammals, so that I can say “That has got to be the seal-iest thing I’ve ever heard!” and then there will be uproarious laughter, following which everyone will applaud my razor-sharp wit and perspicacity, which I will then humbly attribute to my gifted genetic make-up.

Sometimes, though, I get lucky, and somebody does say something about semi-aquatic marine mammals, and even then, I successfully manage to botch up the whole operation.

…which is followed by a brief, horrified silence. Until I make it worse:

Me: “Is this crowd dead? I mean, c’mon guys, don’t be Flapper”

It’s helpful when your audience bursts into tears; that’s usually your cue to stop talking. But, well, you live and you learn. Oh darn, not again (sorry Flapper).

This is probably why I find I’m so bad at making friends. Everybody loves a funny person, and by logical extension of this fact, everybody hates me. Okay, fine, not “hate”, it’s more like, “I’m not sure if she just made a joke but she said something and laughed hysterically so I’m just going to chuckle to be safe and then back away slowly because she’s scaring me a little”. Most of my friends are my friends on the condition that I don’t try my hand at humour within a ten-mile radius of them.

They made me sign a document.

But you know what’s even harder than humour? Ending posts. It’s important for the end to leave an impact, but not be too abrupt.

Like this:

I know that it’s free to have a blog. I know that the only qualification you need to have a blog is a pair of opposable thumbs to make a username and a password. Wait – you don’t even need that – I know a couple of blogging dogs. They’re better bloggers than I am, actually. They don’t use sentence fragments at every possible opportunity. They don’t mention opposable thumbs in every single post. Their vocabulary is undoubtedly more…um, evolved (ha ha). They don’t laugh at their own puns. In fact, I think one of them has published a book.

And yet, having a blog makes me feel special.

If you’re feeling a sense of déjà vu right now, it’s probably because I have written a post like this before. It’s called ‘I like you, WordPress. I like you a lot.’ In that particular post, I whinged about having five followers and made a virtual puppy-dog face in the vague hope that something would come out of it. WordPress felt pity for this blogger who had apparently been driven to the edge of desperation, and as a result, Freshly Pressed me (that still sounds wrong). On a side note: I should probably clarify that the post in question was not shadow advertising. It’s a mere coincidence that I was Freshly Pressed for a post that hails WordPress as the giver of all good things and the beacon of light that dispels the darkness from my world of hopelessness and oblivion.

Moving on.

Now that I have sufficiently flaunted my Freshly Pressed badge in your face, I’ll come to the point. This post is not like its predecessor. That one hinted at my miserable narcissistic tendencies. This one openly flaunts my miserable narcissistic tendencies. So you can keep reading (unless you had already stopped reading when I began waving my Freshly Pressed badge in the air).

So why does having a blog make me feel special? Well, of course, it’s firstly because I have followers – the very word makes me think of hoards of people genuflecting (I can’t let the blogging dogs get ahead of me so I bought a dictionary) at the altar of my magnificence. But it’s also because having a blog makes me feel like a member of the elite. I personally know only three other people with blogs. And although anyone can have a blog, as I’ve ascertained above, the fact that I was actually allowed to have one makes me feel good. Different. Privileged. Not just another member of the motley crowd.

It’s alright if this is just limited to feeling good about myself. However, I’m ashamed to say I’m not a background blogger. I do my best to mention my blog in any appropriate scenario. It’s not obvious enough to make me seem like a prig – I don’t go around yelling, “Look at me! I’ve got a blog!” but it’s meant to send out subliminal messages to anyone who’s listening:

“Now that you mention it, I wrote something about that on MY BLOG the other day.”
“I was so happy yesterday because somebody new followed MY BLOG.”
“Do you have a blog? I MYself love to BLOG.”

Another thing I do when it comes to my blog, is behaving like a blog snob. It’s like intellectual snobbery, but with absolutely no valid reason to behave like a snob. When I have an argument with someone who doesn’t have a blog, I’m ashamed to say that the first thing that comes to mind is always, ‘Do you have a blog? Didn’t think so.’ I don’t say it, but the thought’s there in my head, hand in hand with another thought, ‘I have a blog. Therefore I am better than you.’ These thoughts cloud any rational arguments that I may have, and I’m left saying, quite limply, “I’m telling you, I’m right. I can’t explain exactly why I’m right, but be sure check my blog periodically – I’ll post an explanation when I can think of one.” Just a bit of advice: That doesn’t work. Especially not with your mother.

Sometimes, when somebody says something I don’t like, my first thought is, ‘I’m going to write about you on my blog.’ It’s a different matter that I don’t actually end up doing that. But the fact that I actually thought of it makes me devious.

Yes, the thug life did, in fact, choose me.

To conclude: I love having a blog. I love having followers. I love to walk around, knowing that I’m somehow superior to everyone else simply because I have a username and a password. I love that there is a platform on which I can be the intellectual equivalent of a dog with circumlocutional abilities.

And, WordPress, I will use this platform well, because with great power comes great responsibility.

P.S: A message to the guy who tried to trip me over today:
You’re fatuous. So there.